1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to systems for managing networks of computers and more particularly to systems for monitoring events occurring in a plurality of computers within a computer network.
2. Description of the Background Art
The management of computer networks presents an increasing challenge as the size of these networks grows larger. Computer networks may have a variety of different computers, databases and applications dispersed over a large geographical area and each network component may have different ways of handling information. Ideally these computers are controlled through a relatively small number of "administrative computers" which are dedicated to management and administrative functions, each managing and administrating a large number of the heterogeneous "managed computers."
Management functions include setting and monitoring of various alarms that indicate conditions or "events" requiring management action, the definition and implementation of these actions when the specified events occur, and the monitoring of statistics concerning the operation of the various network computers. This management process can become very complex and time-consuming in large computer networks. Furthermore, the corrective actions for different types of managed computers may vary widely in a highly diverse distributed computing environment. Any given management or administration system used in conjunction with large computer networks is limited by the above factors.
In addition, some aspects of the network communication between computers may impose limitations on the number of computers that can be managed by a given administrative computer. For example, some versions of the UNIX operating system limit the number of computers with which an administration program can simultaneously be connected by limiting the number of data structures in memory that the administration program can use to describe individual network connections. Since computer networks may gradually increase in size, this may become a significant problem in conventional management and administration systems.
Thus it is desirable to provide a management system that is sufficiently flexible to handle the administration of a wide variety and a large number of managed computers in an efficient manner. Such a management system preferably achieves two distinct objectives. First, as the number of managed computers increases, it becomes essential to prevent the systems administrator from becoming overwhelmed with the increasing amount of management information and action required, and to automate these operations as much as possible. Thus it is desirable to include facilities within a management system to avoid presenting the system administrator with excessive amounts of information and to minimize the number of decisions and actions that are required by the system administrator. Secondly, it is desirable to provide a management system that is not limited by aspects of network communications within a given operating system, so that the management system can be scaled to handle increasingly large numbers of computers. Therefore, an improved scalable event management system is needed for administering a distributed computing environment according to the present invention.